Quotes from Orlando Figes

There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.

There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes —such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power—and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed.

The peasant also found another use for this sacred object. 'He says of the icon: "It's good for praying -- and you can cover the pots with it too.

Once a rumour, however false, became the subject of common belief, it assumed the status of a political fact